In Praise of Styling: A Neuroevolutionary Perspective on Visual Culture

This paper advances an alternative perspective on what is commonly referred to as styling. Adopting a neuroevolutionary perspective, it challenges the trivialization of this seminal facet of designing. Via its long evolutionary history in a hostile environment the brain specialized in visual knowledge, with language and later numeracy as comparatively minor add-ons. Visual knowledge acquisition became an evolutionary imperative, feeding the highly sophisticated neural storage and classification systems that accompanied this specialization. Styling is an extension of visual knowledge acquisition into visual knowledge creation. It is contended that styling is an evolutionary exaptation whereby the original brain function of visual knowledge acquisition was adapted to externalize visual information. This externalization subsequently became a powerful means of indicating group identity and allegiance, and laid the foundations of visual culture. The externalization it shares with the fine arts; the distinction being that styling is associated with purposive objects. Emerging evidence also indicates that styling predisposes us to positive or negative attitudes to such non-aesthetic features of products and services as usability and trust. As such, it emotionally primes us. Evidence is presented that suggests a process of deceptively high sophistication, and one that questions fundamental assumptions in this field.